Now Comes The Hard Part

When President Bush laid out six national goals for education in his
January State of the Union Message, an eerie sense of déjà vu
accompanied his speech.

More than five years earlier, in September 1984, then-President
Reagan also presented a set of national education goals--four targets to
be reached by 1990. One of those goals--to raise the high school graduation
rate to more than 90 percent--was among the challenges Bush has embraced
for the year 2000.

Reagan adapted his objectives from those first issued by former
Secretary of Education Terrel Bell in December 1983, at the conclusion
of the nation's first "education forum" in Indianapolis. At the
meeting, attended by 2,500 of the nation's key education policymakers,
Bell called on each state to meet four education goals by the end of
the decade.

In addition to increasing the graduation rate, they included raising
scores on college-admissions tests above the 1965 average, making
teachers' salaries competitive with those for entry-level college
graduates in business and engineering, and stiffening high school
graduation requirements.

The list of people attending the forum was impressive, including 8
governors, 10 members of Congress, 150 state legislators, about 30
chief state school officers, and some 60 college and university
presidents.

But the goals pronounced there faded from public memory well before
the date set for reaching them. Now, many people are asking what will
make the current goals-setting endeavor any different.

"The real danger here is, if you repeatedly set goals that are not
met, and there is no accountability for failing to meet them, you make
the announcement of future goals a dead letter," says Gary Bauer, who
held several top Education Department posts during the Reagan
Administration. "You raise false expectations, and you also may divert
attention from asking the hard questions about why we are in this
fix."

There are some differences between the current goals-setting effort
and those that preceded it. Bell's goals were created in response to A
Nation at Risk, the report by the National Commission on Excellence in
Education that is widely credited with quickening the pace of school
reform. That report was the work of a relatively small number of
individuals. Outside the group, "No one accepted the goals, as such, or
very few did," Bell says.

In contrast, the current set of national goals represents the
combined efforts of the President, the Secretary of Education, and all
50 of the nation's governors. That could be a powerful coalition for
change, particularly given Bush's campaign pledge to be the
"education" President.

Even so, there may be more similarities than differences between the
two occasions. Many problems that waylaid the last goals-setting
initiative still exist and could sandbag the current one. Observers
question the White House's commitment to move beyond rhetoric, and they
point to a dearth of financial resources needed to make lofty national
goals attainable. Nor does the nation have appropriate measurements and
data to let the public know if goals have been met.

Without some careful planning, Bell cautions, the "results" could
be much the same this time around.

"The country has always set national goals," notes John Chubb,
senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. "We set national goals
for education after Sputnik, and we set them during the War on Poverty,
and we set them in 1983, and we're going to set them again.

"There's nothing wrong with keeping the country focused on what
we're trying to achieve, but the question is always, 'What's the
follow-up?' Nearly 90 percent of the issue should not be the goals, but
what people have in mind for achieving them."

Many educators describe the goals that President Bush unveiled in
January as disappointing and unrealistic. For example, few people think
that U.S. students can rank first, worldwide, in math and science by
the year 2000 when they currently come in last or near last on
international comparisons.

"The goals I've read about thus far strike me as pablum," says
Dorothy Rich, president of the Home and School Institute Inc. "They are
too big to be doable. It's like saying, 'No one will be killing each
other in automobile accidents by the year 2000.' It's almost like the
Wizard of Oz."

Indeed, the national targets remain nearly as vague as those
President Bush first described in September, when he and the governors
agreed to work on national goals. The governors had promised to
develop, by their midwinter meeting in late February, a more explicit
set of national goals than those listed in the President's speech. But
they also needed a plan to reach them. So far, many educators observe,
there has been little talk about means.

"I don't think one has to be cynical to say that the President
didn't say very much'' in his State of the Union Message, says Theodore
Sizer, chairman of the department of education at Brown University.

"He ordered the cars to drive faster; that's about what it was,"
Sizer adds. "He didn't say how the engine was going to be souped up, or
whether the tires had to be fixed, or whether the road should be any
different."

Indeed, some worry that, in the race to come up with a list of goals
by this winter, the President and the governors chose rapidity over
content.

"Our view here was that they were pushing these goals out much too
fast without giving enough thought to the strategies for attaining
them," says Sandra Kessler Hamburg, director of education studies for
the Committee for Economic Development. Without more detailed
performance targets and a believable implementation plan, another
observer suggests, the current effort "just doesn't look serious."

Bush's federal budget proposals, for example, are hardly a windfall
for education. He calls for an additional $500 million for Project Head
Start in 1991. But college student aid comes in for cuts. And the
Education Department's $500 million increase does not even keep pace
with inflation.

For now, many educators are withholding judgment. They say they will
give more credence to the goals-setting initiative if Bush and the
governors enact some visible new mechanisms for helping to reach their
targets.

"When President Kennedy said we had to beat the Russians to the moon
and get a person there," notes F. James Rutherford, chief education
officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
"we didn't just strap some rockets on the side of an airplane."

Rutherford would like the federal government to create an
independent national council that could translate the goals into a
workable action plan, monitor progress, and report on results. Marian
Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, has suggested
devising a National Assessment of Educational Practice to measure who
is taught what, by whom, when, for how long, and with what support.

Sizer wants the government to underwrite a research-and-development
fund that is generous enough to help redesign the schools.

The governors themselves suggested a number of policies that could
help achieve national goals in 1986, when they released Time for
Results: The Governors' 1991 Report on Education. That document
described an array of initiatives for improving the schools that the
governors promised to work on over the next five years. Michael Cohen,
director of education programs at the National Governors' Association,
says the governors will devise more specific plans for reaching
national goals before their annual meeting this summer.

But for now, many people note, there is little relationship between
the goals-setting process going on in Washington and the realities of
most schools. How to combine the current thrust toward national goals
with the myriad innovations being tried in individual schools around
the country is unclear. Some people worry that the move toward
standardization which national goals imply could discourage much-needed
creativity at the school level.

What the governors and the President choose to do in the next six
months could determine whether the nation's goals for the year 2000
become more than a mere wish list. "Everyone's fear--or some people's
hope, I suppose--is that this will be the end of it," notes one
observer. "There aren't that many people out there reminding the
decisionmakers that they have an obligation here."

--Lynn Olson, Education Week

Web Only

Notice: We recently upgraded our comments. (Learn more here.) If you are logged in as a subscriber or registered user and already have a Display Name on edweek.org, you can post comments. If you do not already have a Display Name, please create one here.

Ground Rules for Posting
We encourage lively debate, but please be respectful of others. Profanity and personal attacks are prohibited. By commenting, you are agreeing to abide by our user agreement.
All comments are public.